Tuesday, 6 November 2018

Here Be - CARROTS!

Here Be - CARROTS! Here-be Post 7

Carrots are such useful vegetables. You can steam them, bake them, stir-fry them, mash them and make them into a pretend-healthy cake or muffin mix. They're a good colour and most people like them. They also seem to have worked their nefarious orange way into quite a few of my books. The picture on the left shows just a choice selection of carrot-appearances. They appear to be my go-to vegetable in fiction, just as they are in fact.
In Sunshower, the Reverend Rory Inkersoll is chopping carrots when Tab and Josefa go to visit him. Even mutable fay priests like them, it seems. In Thornfair, Rowan Amhill just wants to follow the old tradition of the thorn fairs and wear her thornfair gown to the market. Unfortunately, her mother Tansy insists she must buy carrots, and get the vendor to cut off the tops. In Horizontal Bunny Hop, Mab O'Mara has an Easter birthday, so her family gets her rabbit-and-egg-themed joke gifts. There's even a bottle of carrot cologne. Khloe in Khloe Out of Arcady lives at Opal Dig. She finds it difficult to buy fresh carrots. In Pisky Business Jory is chopping carrots when he and Linda have an important conversation. She keeps stealing bits of carrot stick to eat. In Animal Twist carrots star as quagga fodder. The Mares of Merryland Chase like carrots, and one of the Regents wears a carrot badge. Ness and Anna from Heather and Heath and Anna's Own are both colonial women who grow carrots. In Sam and the Sylvan the sylvan Oash explains to Sam just why there are no carrots in the garden. In Five for Bandinangi, Fluffbugs Fang the rabbit snaffles Pop's catering carrot. In New Dreams Edsen hates to think of an autopsy because he doesn't like the idea of his friends being chopped up like carrots. And of course the irrepressible Pearl the Magical Unicorn loves carrots...

So, that's just a sample. Maybe I should make an effort to use another vegetable in my next book. Parsnips, anyone?